Coloured Textiles: The Art Portfolio of Sharon Blake
1048 - Sonoma, September, organza, silk, linen
Sharon Blake has lived all over the United States, and much of her artwork draws inspiration from the various settings and scenes that she’s been exposed to via these travels. Sharon’s artistic portfolio includes abstracted landscapes created in coloured textiles, as well as sharp studio photography.
0964 - Grey House, organza, silk, linen
I really love Sharon’s series of textile landscapes. The works in this series all seem to follow the same compositional “rules,” with gradients of colour seemingly radiating out of a central horizon line. I’m impressed by how consistently the works indicate the parts of a landscape -- a sky, meeting earth at a central line, characteristics of the light and landscape expressing themselves in variations and imperfections of the fabric -- using very sparse, minimal figuration.
The artist’s studio photographs take a different approach toward this sense of clean, sparse composition. In these works, Sharon stages objects -- sometimes household, sometimes natural detritus -- on backgrounds either stark white or black. The viewer is left to contemplate an object in a new context, removed totally from any outside influence.
